For a minute there it looked like alto saxist Donald Harrison might move to Chicago: when he appeared at last year’s Chicago Jazz Festival, his native New Orleans was still underwater, and Harrison told me that (a) he’d lost pretty much everything and (b) he’d always liked Chicago a lot. Though he didn’t end up relocating, the feeling’s mutual. Harrison’s bubbling-gumbo tone has the combination of soul and acerbity that has long distinguished Chicago’s best saxists, like Von Freeman and Eddie Harris and even Joseph Jarman; he’s become one of the most reliable visiting crowd-pleasers, with a soaring lyricism offset (but not replaced) by contemporary techniques....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Most of the program comprised Newbould demonstrating how he made dishes for the royal family: duck bigarade, what I think he said they called “haddock St. Germain” (the royal version of fish ‘n chips–pretty little haddock fillets in what looked like panko crumbs. Although doesn’t “St. Germain” mean “with peas”?), prime rib–all classic French/English cuisine that was, frankly, sort of a pleasure to see made, every roasted potato carved with its correct seven sides....

Kung Fu Hustle *** (A must see) Directed by Stephen Chow Written by Chow, Tsang Kan Cheong, Xin Huo, Chan Man Keung With Chan, Kwok Kuen Chan, Qiu Yuen, Wah Yuen, and Siu Lung Leung Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Chow and his distributor, Sony Classics this time, have clearly packaged Kung Fu Hustle for American viewers, with an ad campaign that prominently displays Roger Ebert’s reference points: “Imagine a film in which Jackie Chan and Buster Keaton meet Quentin Tarantino and Bugs Bunny....

A Greek heroine fights fate in Jeremy Menekseoglu’s smart, funny, feminist take on Antigone’s sister, Ismene. Born into a family “reared on weeping,” Ismene is a rational young woman–unlike her sister, executed for burying her brother against Creon’s orders. In this reinterpretation, Ismene is sent to a school for unruly girls, where she encounters Iphigenia, Procne, Philomena, and a bitter girl without a famous story (charismatic Courtney Arnett). Claire Fitzpatrick is winning as Ismene, who hopes to escape the tragedy foretold for her....

Opportunities to see world-class experimental theater in Chicago are few and far between. But for three years running Chopin Theatre director Zygmunt Dyrkacz has brought Poland’s astonishing image-based Teatr Cogitatur from Katowice to Wicker Park for the U.S. premieres of its shadowy, hypnotic pieces. Writer-director Witold Izdebski’s La Luna ostensibly follows a group of bohemian tenement dwellers banding together against a host of unnamed menacing forces. The more overt the content, however, the more the work verges on cliche: what succeeds in Izdebski’s ritualized scenes is the cryptic and oblique–a man throwing wine contemptuously in a mannequin’s face, a woman blowing dust from her palm toward a hooded figure....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The poverty line, which is now built into all kinds of government helping programs, was drawn up by a woman, Mollie Orshansky, who had first-hand experience with hunger. The line is essentially three times a minimum food budget, a level below which “everyday living implied choosing between an adequate diet of the most economical sort and some other necessity....

This new play by writer-director Sean Graney centers on talentless writer-director Ernie, who’s struggling to create what he hopes is a masterpiece–a film adaptation of Christopher Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage–in his basement. But the perverted producer will put up the money only if Ernie agrees to a porn treatment of the subject. In Graney’s giddy, almost farcical first act, expertly played in this Side Project staging, Ernie drags his awful cast through his awful script....

Predictably enough, indie twits en masse struck Caithlin De Marrais from their crush lists after Rainer Maria’s 2003 album, Long Knives Drawn. No longer content to poetically twinkle amid Kyle Fischer’s guitars, the singer began to articulate her personal and sexual prerogatives–something that was bound to happen to a nice midwestern girl who’d moved to Brooklyn. And the band shaped up its song structures as well, no longer overly relying on dramatic shifts in texture....

Various Artists You can’t hear your favorite song too many times. But what if you start listening to that song the way somebody else hears it? If you share your affection for a classic tune with lots of other admirers, you’ve probably had to suffer through some ill-advised cover versions–well-known songs invite all kinds of laziness from their interpreters, good intentions notwithstanding. Some bands wander far afield, relying on listeners to carry the original in their heads and superimpose it over a threadbare remake (like the Scissor Sisters’ glittery disco makeover of “Comfortably Numb”)....

It is difficult to argue with Noah Berlatsky’s skewering review of Mark Strand’s latest collection [“Pulitzer vs. Penguins,” October 20], partially because I am not familiar with that text and partially because he raises some points. Drinking whiskey at dusk is something of a cliche, but no more than claiming that an art form is dying or dead. Referring to Strand’s book as “another nail in the coffin of contemporary poetry” is about as cliched a thing as one can write, and far less interesting than the idea of being drunk at sunset....

[snip] Not-so-intelligent design. “Would an intelligent designer create millions of species and then make them go extinct, only to replace them with other species, repeating this process over and over again?” asks the University of Chicago’s Jerry Coyne in the New Republic. “Would an intelligent designer produce animals having a mixture of mammalian and reptilian traits, at exactly the time when reptiles are thought to have been evolving into mammals? Why did the designer give tiny, non-functional wings to kiwi birds?...

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I love shows that have a quiet/loud dichotomy. I’m all in favor of subtle droners paired with jackhammer ones, punk bands with acoustic soloists, et cetera. They just engage different parts of the ear/brain interaction, and that’s a good thing. But I’m not so into it when the crowd is the loud part and the band is the quiet one....

Dissonant is the word for this Broadway hit, now receiving its Chicago premiere from a local cast. The spelling-bee contestants inhabit a no-man’s-land of age: the adults playing the kids, who unaccountably seem to range from 8 to 14, never come across as either flesh-and-blood nerdy grade-schoolers or witty adult takes on them. The setting is a homogenous small town, though audience-pandering jokes refer to Chicago. Worse, cartoonish characterizations by writers Rachel Sheinkin, William Finn, and Jay Reiss clash with attempts to tug at our heartstrings....

In his second inaugural address President Bush informed us, “The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.” I couldn’t agree more, but two documentaries released this week suggest that our conception of freedom may not extend to every point on the globe. Inside Deep Throat, an HBO documentary produced by Ron Howard’s longtime collaborator Brian Grazer, chronicles the production and exhibition of the notorious adult film Deep Throat (1972) and the free-speech battle it sparked....

My favorite John Ford feature (1953) was also the director’s, and it’s one of his cheapest and coziest, made in black and white at Republic Pictures. Vaguely a remake of his 1934 Judge Priest, set in an idyllic Kentucky town at the turn of the century, it features the same alcoholic hero–this time played by Charles Winninger and even more transparently a stand-in for Ford. The busy plot, confused by insensitive studio cutting, concerns racial strife, prostitution, prudery, and death and involves the entire community; Ford makes the film a ceremonial elegy and testament to everything that he loves and respects....

Thomas Yancey has never been charged with a sex crime, but last spring, a few months after being released from prison, he had to go to police headquarters on South Michigan to register as a sex offender. Yancey, who’s 52, insists he doesn’t belong on a list of sex offenders, though he’d understand if someone wanted him on a list of child murderers. In 1974, when he was 21, he and a 15-year-old accomplice killed a teenage acquaintance during a botched robbery....

Georges Feydeau’s ur-farce, as translated by contemporary farceur David Ives and directed by Gary Griffin, isn’t a nonstop gut buster. But it is a satisfying bonbon of a show, stuffed with sly high-caliber performances. The cast are mostly local folks, including the redoubtable Rick Hall in the dual role of stuffy insurance executive Chandebise and Poche, the porter at the hotel where Chandebise’s wife, suspecting him of an affair, devises a trap....

“We’re all fashion whores in my family,” says Sabina Hyderi, a former lawyer and part-time actress who, with her brother Sameer, runs this clunkily named vintage shop at 2823 N. Lincoln–just a few blocks from My Masala, the contemporary boutique belonging to her sister Salwa Harmon. Last summer the Hyderis transformed what looks to have been a small apartment into Sabina’s idea of a “French boudoir-slash-lounge,” painting the walls in rich, warm colors and installing a luxurious dressing area with a sari-covered sofa behind French doors....

Born in Jerusalem, multi–instrumentalist Raz Mesinai grew up there and in New York, absorbing the sounds of both cities. Dub has been an element in his work from the beginning (as in the wiggy 90s project Sub Dub), but the music of the Middle East has played an increasingly important role. Under his own name he’s made three abstract albums for John Zorn’s Tzadik label that highlight his interest in pure drifting texture, but when he records as Badawi, his music’s more beat driven and stylistically rangy....

Wallace Davis was in his west-side restaurant on June 27 when he heard a woman calling for help. He says he ran outside and the woman told him a man with a butcher’s knife had been trying to hold her up. Davis says he never imagined that when the police arrived he’d be the one they pummeled, arrested, and charged with battery. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Davis won, but within a few years he’d been indicted in two cases....